except profane matter.Matterisimmortal in the process ofdevelopment.And beyond mat-
ter? Nonsense. Thereyouhaveyour redemption.⁸In thisrambling,incoherent outburst,Lotz attacksLevenstein for expectingare-
enactment of working-class suffering.Yet in his response, this particular worker
also experiments withanumber of rhetoricalpersonas, including the moralist
and the cynic.Twocompetingimpulses can be identified, his gratefulness for
having beenrecognizedasafellow human being and his anger about being en-
listed inasociological experiment.His use of literary tropes,completewith ap-
pealsto thegods of antiquity,reveals his desire to partake in the bourgeois cul-
tural habitus that,aswill be shown in chapter 8, was an important part of the
Social Democratic program ofKulturandBildung.At the same time, his insist-
ence onamaterialist worldview suggests an unwillingnessto share Levenstein’s
belief in open dialogue asaconduit to social peace and reconciliation. The depth
of the worker’ssoul, Lotzseems to be saying,isafunction of bourgeois individu-
alism,inwhich the worker’s“true”feelingsexist outside discourse and are
bound toremain unknowable.“The world does not know this language,”he con-
cludes;meanwhile Levenstein believes thatthis languagecan be learned and
usedto good ends.
Forthe most part,workers’life writingsfrom the 1900s and 1910s offer un-
varnished depictions of the difficult working and living conditions of manual
and rural laborers,often far removed from the large factories,steelworks,and
coal mines typicallyassociatedwith the industrial proletariat.These books
give harrowingaccounts of poverty,hunger,sickness, vagrancy,and delinquen-
cy.They alsoincludeappallingexamples of physicalmistreatment,ethnic dis-
crimination, and political persecution, as well as (for the times) shockinglycas-
ual accounts of premarital sex, sexual violence, and part-time prostitution. In
sharing their stories,the worker-writers draw heavilyonestablished literarygen-
res and offer confessional narrativesinthe tradition ofAugustine and Rousseau
and coming-of-agestories modeledonthe GoetheanBildungsroman,ornovel of
education. The activists among them offer up socialistversions of whatKathari-
na Gerstenbergerdescribes as the trajectory“from sufferingtosalvation,⁹”com-
plete with the religious imaginary known from the cult surrounding Lassalle.
Max Lotz,Letter of 31August 1908, in Levenstein,Ausder Tiefe,73–74.
This is the title of Chapter3on Adelheid PoppinKatharina Gerstenberger,Truth toTell: Ger-
manWomen’sAutobiographies andTurn-of-the-CenturyCulture(Ann Arbor:University of Michi-
gan Press,2000).
142 Chapter 7